Okay, so I was being sarcastic about the clever name. Nevertheless, the joint venture announced by Redbox and Verizon back in February has finally given birth to an official name, and that name is Redbox Instant by Verizon. Together, Verizon and Redbox plan on bringing yet another video on-demand streaming and download service to the market. As long as Verizon doesn’t screw it up with pricing, the Redbox kiosk/streaming combo could be a real winner.
Finally!
I’ve been a Viber user for sometime now, but I’ve always been frustrated with its lack of support for group messaging — something I believe every messaging app should do from day one. Thankfully, this is one of the features introduced in Viber’s latest update, available on Android and iOS today.
Let the games begin. Within minutes of the first Olympic athletes arriving in London for the summer games, Grindr — a geolocation-based dating app primarily geared towards gay men — crashed due to an onslaught of unprecedented demand. Technicians believe that the arrival of the Olympians created a wave of new customers signing up for the service that caused the servers to grind to a halt.
A mere ten days before the scheduled patent infringement trial between Samsung and Apple, US District Judge Lucky Koh rejected two more proposals from Samsung, maker of Android enabled smartphones. Judge Koh entered a supplemental claim construction order in which two disputed terms are now defined. Unfortunately for Samsung, who initially requested the order, the definition decision favors Apple, using the Cupertino-based tech company’s definition in the dispute.
We bumped into neophyte Australian headphones-maker Audiofly in January, during a press-only event at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and gave two models in the four-model lineup a whirl. Their mid-level AF45 set sounded great for $50; but the next one I tried — the top-of-the-line AF78 ($200) — left me slack-jawed with disbelief; its sound knocked my socks off, even amid the cacophony of noisy journalists.
What makes the AF78 unusual is its speaker arrangement.
Many mid-to-high-end canalphones are powered by tiny armature speakers, while moving coil drivers are found pretty much everywhere except the very high end. Armatures are generally better at producing clean highs and mids, but can lack deep bass; moving coils, on the other hand, are generally not as good at reproducing the clarity of an armature. But the AF78 is part of an elite group of models — like the Scosche IEM856m I reviewed last year — that employ both a moving coil speaker and a balanced armature in each ear, in an attempt to give the listener the best of both worlds. And it works spectacularly.
